


No Such Thing As Second Chances

by ignipes



Category: Nikita (TV 2010), Person of Interest (TV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 00:04:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/741752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two spies walk into a bar. Some bad guys say <i>ouch</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The first time their missions overlap, it's a coincidence. A real coincidence, the kind that doesn't happen in their line of work, especially not in New York. But that's what it is. A crowded bar in Manhattan, suits and bankers and expensive drinks, a familiar face and a coincidence. 

Nikita has been following the ex-boyfriend of an ex-Division agent who may or may not be trying to reconnect with a cartel member who may or may not be connected to an undersecretary at the Colombian consulate. That's all they have to go on—they don't even know their wayward agent is in New York, much less involved with the Colombians—but Nikita is willing to give it one more night before telling Ryan they have more important things to do. She follows the ex-boyfriend into a bar and pauses just inside the door. Her quarry is sitting alone at a tiny table in the corner. If he's meeting somebody, they haven't arrived yet. 

She looks the room over. The team back in ops is seeing what she sees through the camera in her glasses, so she hears Birkhoff's surprised, "Hey, whoa, wait," and Michael's warning, "Nikita, two o'clock," at the same moment she sees the familiar man at the end of the bar. 

"Nobody told me this was a party," Nikita says. 

She turns again, acts like she's searching for somebody in the crowded room, glances back at the bar. His back is to her and he's hunched over his drink, doing a very good impression of a man unaware of the noisy bar around him, but Nikita would recognize John Reese anywhere. Spend two weeks playing cat-and-mouse with somebody through the streets of Istanbul and you learned to pick a man out of a crowd. That bizarre inter-agency penis-measuring contest hadn't made anybody happy in the end; Nikita had never known for sure whether there was a real mission, or if the only goal had been to ruin the CIA's day. Percy had been fond of asserting his dominance in a way other organizations would understand, and he had always hated it when the CIA tried to play spy games on territory he had claimed as his own.

Through her earpiece, she hears Sonya ask, "Is that man somebody we know?"

"John Reese," Nikita says. She watches him turn his head. He's subtle about it, but he's there to watch somebody. Not the ex at the lonely table in the corner, but a group of laughing Wall Street women by the window. Nobody Nikita recognizes, and definitely not anybody who showed up as known associates. "We met in Istanbul."

"And Tirana," Michael puts in. 

"And possibly Montenegro," Nikita adds. "I was never certain about that one."

"Definitely Montenegro," Michael says. "I got fifty-three stitches as a souvenir to prove it."

"He's a company man," Nikita explains. 

But Michael says, "Not anymore. They cut him loose."

Nikita starts across the room, taking her time. "I don't remember hearing about that."

"It happened when you were still out in the cold," Michael says. "It was the kind of termination that involved a Predator drone, a Hellfire missile, and not much of a retirement package."

"Percy gloated for _weeks_ about that fuck-up," Birkhoff says. "Reese looks pretty good for a guy who had a missile dropped on him. I guess they missed."

"Well, it's the CIA," Michael says.

Nikita smiles. "Don't be like that. You'll hurt Ryan's feelings."

Ryan says, "Ryan's feelings are just fine. I don't suppose we have any idea who this man works for now?"

"None at all," Birkhoff says. Nikita can hear the rattle of his keyboard, rapid-fire typing, the squeak of his chair as he rolls from one desk to another. "If he's back with the Agency, there's no record of it."

"Aw, Birkhoff, the database giving you trouble?" Nikita says.

"Only because they stole their method of digitally erasing people from me," Birkhoff replies. He sounds genuinely offended, and maybe a little proud. "I hope whatever Percy got for that algorithm was worth it. I'm looking other places, but the kind of people who hire presumed dead ex-assassins don't keep nice thorough employment records."

There's a mirror behind the bar, obscured by bottles and glasses on brass-edged shelves, and Nikita isn't even halfway across the room before Reese spots her. He doesn't react at all—he's looking right at her, knows she's looking right back at him—but he lifts his glass to take a sip, sets it down and doesn't move otherwise. His lips move; he's talking to somebody. 

"Maybe I'll ask him," Nikita says. 

That sets off the expected volley of warnings and disagreements and arguments in ops, but she ignores them all as she steps up to the bar. She gives the bartender a smile, orders a martini—she can't help herself—and turns to face John Reese.

"What's a nice man like you doing in a place like this?" she asks.

Reese doesn't smile, but he turns on his stool and rests his elbow on the bar. He's armed: one piece that she can see, probably two she can't, not that he had ever let a lack of available weapons stop him from picking a fight. Birkhoff is right. He looks pretty good for a dead man, and better even than when she had last seen him in Tirana, scowling and sullen with a team he obviously didn't like, and wound so tight she had been half-certain he would blow his mission before she had a chance to do it for him. 

"I heard you went rogue," Reese says.

"I did." Nikita accepts her martini and takes a sip. "I heard you died."

"I did," Reese says. "It didn't stick."

"We all need a change of pace once in a while," Nikita says. "I have to admit, you never struck me as the investment banking type."

"You'd be surprised by the overlap in required skill sets," Reese says. 

Nikita laughs. "I doubt it. I've met plenty of bankers." 

Over by the window, the Wall Street women burst out laughing again, and Reese flicks a glance their way. There's nothing suspicious about what the women are doing: drinking hard, celebrating, talking loud enough people across the street could hear their conversation without much effort. It seems to be a conversation about a very attractive and very flexible yoga teacher they all admire. His name is Renaldo, and all three women are in absolute agreement that he's as gay as a rainbow.

"Busy night?" Nikita says.

Instead of answering, Reese says, "Where's your less charming half?"

"Don't let him know you're working alone," Michael says. Nikita valiantly refrains from rolling her eyes. 

"Michael says 'hi,'" she says. "He doesn't hold Montenegro against you at all."

That almost earns something what might, at a stretch, be the distant cousin of a smile. "Not at all?" Reese asks.

"Maybe a bit," Nikita says. "But what's a little knife fight between friends?"

She has a good view of the door from where she's sitting, so she sees it when the consulate's undersecretary comes in, stops to stare and glower just inside the door. He's wearing a fedora, of all things, as though that will provide some kind of disguise. At his corner table, the ex sinks into his two-thousand-dollar suit. The undersecretary approaches but doesn't take the opposite seat. 

Nikita slides down from her stool. That's her cue.

But she waits long enough to nod toward the women by the window. "What's your interest?"

Reese drains his glass. "I don't know yet."

In the earpiece, Birkhoff says, "Right. That's not creepy or anything."

The undersecretary and the ex are both standing now, and arguing, faces close together, hands clenched. Nikita says, "Love to stay and chat, but I'm meeting someone." She leaves her unfinished martini on the bar and sincerely hopes John Reese hasn't taken up the life of a serial killer since his violent exit from the CIA. She would hate to have to hunt him down.

She takes a single step away, but Reese stops her with a hand on her arm. Nikita tenses, and she's pretty sure she's not imagining more than one sharp intake of breath over the earpiece. 

"The man in the hat has two out front, two in the back alley," Reese says. "The boss is waiting in the car."

"How the hell..." Birkhoff is typing quickly. "I have no idea how he knows that, Niki, but he's right. There are two lurkers out back we didn't spot before. They're avoiding the camera, but I've got their shadows."

Nikita eases her arm out of Reese's grip. "Five outside, plus those two clowns?" 

Reese raises an eyebrow. "Need help?"

Nikita gives him a smile. "Not in these shoes. It's good to see you again, John."

The man in the hat and his new best friend are taking their leave, so she does too.

-

Five hours later, Nikita's holding her shoes in one hand as she rides the elevator into the base. One of her heels is broken off—and possibly still lodged in some unfortunate man's arm—and there's one corrupt diplomat checking in for an early morning flight to Bogotá, a wannabe cartel kingpin gift-wrapped and lawyered-up in a precinct holding cell for the NYPD and DEA to fight over, and, unfortunately, one former Division assassin still in the wind, because the ex-boyfriend hasn't seen her in months, since long before Division imploded. 

The base is quiet, nearly everybody gone to sleep after the operation ended, but she's not surprised to find Birkhoff and Michael still working in ops. Birkhoff is leaning close to one of his screens, muttering to himself; he has the same wild-eyed, over-caffeinated look he gets when he's chasing down a lead. Michael is sitting beside him, legs up on a third chair, looking as impatient as he always done with Birkhoff is working. It's such a familiar sight it's almost cozy, even in the middle of base, in the small hours of the morning. 

"Aw, this is sweet, guys," Nikita says. "You know you don't have to wait up for me." She drops her shoes on the floor and stands behind Michael, puts her hands on his shoulders. 

He leans into the touch and says, "We thought you might want to see this."

"What is it?"

With a tap of a few keys, Birkhoff fills the screens on the wall with words and images. Poor surveillance shots, crime scene photos, what look like a number of blog and forum posts, more NYPD incident write-ups than she can count, online news articles, and several pages of at least one FBI report. Nikita recognizes the attached photo at once. A rogue CIA agent blows himself up on a New York City street and it makes news, no matter who tries to cover it up, and she remembers Mark Snow from their encounter in Tirana, months after the dust had settled in Istanbul. Snow hadn't made much of an impression at the time, not as much as John Reese, and definitely not as much as Kara Stanton, a woman who smiled too easily and enjoyed her job too much. 

Another few keystrokes, and a video recording snaps front and center. It's aimed through a set of glass doors and toward the street; a few cars pass.

"This is from the security camera at an art gallery a few blocks from that bar you were at earlier," Birkhoff says. 

"I was nowhere near there," Nikita says. 

"We decided to follow your old CIA buddy to see what he was up to," Birkhoff says. At Nikita's look, he jerks his thumb over his shoulder. "It was his idea. I only ever commandeer the resources of public and private surveillance networks for authorized black operations, not for personal vendettas. That's all Mikey's doing."

"Fifty-three stitches," Michael says, unapologetic. "I have a scar."

"I've seen the scar." Nikita bends down to kiss the top of his head. "You're cute when you're holding a grudge."

Birkhoff rolls his eyes. "He is, sure, but if we followed everybody Michael has a grudge against, we would never get any other work done. What's important is that our fellow undead spy was totally stalking those women at the bar. Don't you want to know why?"

Nikita shrugs, then admits, "Okay, I'm curious."

"Watch," says Birkhoff. "This is the recording not long after you left the bar. Probably right about the time you were kneeing that dude in the stupid hat in the balls."

The women pass by the gallery front first. There are three of them, and they're unsteady on their feet, their laughter obvious even without any sound. They walk beyond the windows and out of sight, and almost immediately two men come into view. Both on the short side, but stocky, heavily muscled, and one of them is carrying a baseball bat. The man with the bat breaks into a sprint and is gone from the camera's view; the other man follows right behind him.

"What—"

Michael reaches up to squeeze her hand. "Watch."

That's when the third man races by the gallery storefront. He's moving fast. It's barely a glimpse. But Nikita chased John Reese through more alleys and markets and high-end hotel lobbies in Istanbul than she could count; she doesn't need more than a glimpse. 

The baseball bat flies back into view a moment later; it rolls off the sidewalk into a gutter. 

Then one of the men flies back into view too. He doesn't so much roll as slam into the gallery window hard enough to make the glass tremble, and he slumps to the ground. His friend follows a few seconds later. They're both alive, clutching what look like broken arms or wrists to their midsections, but they don't try to get up.

Birkhoff says, "9-1-1 got a call right about that time from a woman who says her violent ex-husband and his equally violent brother accosted her and her friends on this nice quiet street in the middle of their girls' night out." He brings up the recording, but plays it at a low enough volume to talk right over it. "She has no idea what would have happened if a stranger hadn't come out of nowhere to interrupt the attack. She didn't get the man's name. He was gone by the time the cops arrived."

The call ends, and the security recording loops back to the start. Nikita watches thoughtfully. "Burned CIA assassin turned Good Samaritan on the mean city streets?"

"Oh, it's better than that," Birkhoff says. He's typing furiously again; Nikita can't even begin to follow all the things he's pulling up on the screens. 

Michael shakes his head slightly. "As much as I hate to agree with Birkhoff when he's like this, he's right. It is better than that."

Birkhoff is grinning now; it gives him a manic look in the blue light from the multiple screens. "So much better. Try burned CIA assassin turned New York City urban legend. Have you ever heard about the man in the suit?"


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a quiet interlude in a library.

It's almost disappointing how easy it is to dispatch the former Mr. Bettina Lakewood and his ex-con brother when they decide to give Ms. Lakewood trouble. Almost, but not quite. They get enough numbers that lead to gunfights and bullet wounds that John can appreciate a more straightforward approach. His scraped knuckles are the only evidence he has that he did anything with his night besides have an overpriced drink at an overcrowded bar. The ex-con brother had dropped like a marionette with cut strings the second he realized somebody was fighting back; John had missed his face and punched the wall instead. It stung.

John leaves Bettina Lakewood and her friends to deal with the cops and stops for Thai on the way back to the library. It's not yet midnight and he hasn't eaten since morning, when Ms. Lakewood's number came up, and he's pretty sure Finch hasn't either. Holding the bag of food in one hand, he pulls his phone from his pocket and dials Detective Carter with the other.

She answers with, "Not tonight. No way. You are not asking for a favor tonight." It's stern enough and disappointed enough that John can't tell if it's her mother-of-a-teenager voice or her stuck-in-an-interview-room-with-a-stupid-perp voice. They sound eerily similar. 

"Good evening, Detective," John says. "How's movie night with Taylor?"

There's a pause—that's definitely her should-have-remembered-to-take-the-phone-battery-out suspicious silence—and Carter says, "What do you want?"

"There was an incident at a bar in midtown about an hour ago," John begins. 

Carter groans, actually groans out loud, relaxed and unprofessional in a way she never allows herself to be while at the precinct. John lets himself smile at the empty street. "Do I even want to ask what you did?" she asks. 

"I didn't do anything," John says, but honesty forces him to add, "Not at the bar. But somebody else did. I want to know what happened."

"Tonight?"

"It can wait until morning," John says. "They'll have a cover-up in place by then, but that will tell us enough."

There's a soft thump: the sound of Carter's slipper-clad feet hitting the floor. "What? Who are you talking about? Covering up what?"

"It can wait. Enjoy your night off, Detective," John says, and he hangs up. 

It's a warm night, and quiet now that there are no bat-wielding ex-husbands to look out for, but John picks up the pace as he pockets his phone. He doesn't want the food to get cold. 

From the outside the library looks as it always does: dark and empty, a hollow shell that would be ominous if anybody ever noticed it, looked up from the sidewalk as they hurried by and wondered what was locked inside. The darkness is heavy through the entrance hall, up the stairs, through the stacks and up the stairs again until he reaches Finch's cluttered corner, warm and bright with yellow light. Bear greets John at the folding gate with typical exuberance; he's happy to see John for about ten seconds before his attention is captivated by the food in the bag.

"I take it Ms. Lakewood and her friends won't be bothered anymore?" Finch turns in his seat, light glancing off his glasses, then turns back to his array of monitors. 

"They'll be fine," John says. He finds a couple of clean forks and pulls a chair up to the desk. Bear settles at his feet, forever hopeful. 

Finch accepts the Styrofoam box John passes to him but hesitates before opening it. "And your former colleague? Is this going to be a..." Finch pauses. "Complication?"

John doesn't answer right away. Not a colleague, he thinks, but a rival—or at least that's how their bosses wanted it, for all that they worked under the same flag. But he doesn't say it; he doesn't know how true it ever was. That had been a real surprise, glancing in the mirror and seeing Nikita there. He had seen the clinging red dress first—as she intended, no doubt—and a heartbeat later recognized her face. 

"Her name is Nikita," he says. 

Finch's hands are poised over the keyboard. "Does she have a last name?"

"No. Not when she was with Division," John says. At Finch's questioning look, he explains, "The organization doesn't exist, so its agents don't either."

Finch blinks. "I see." There is a beat before he starts typing. "Do you have any idea who she's working for now?"

"Until tonight, I assumed she was dead."

"You told her otherwise."

"There were rumors," John says.

The look Finch gives him is amused. "Rumors?"

John shrugs. "Spies gossip."

"That's certainly the first thing that comes to mind when I think of you, Mr. Reese. An irrepressible gossip."

It was Kara who had shared that news with him, gloating and smug: word on the street was Division had lost one of their best agents to a shootout on the Turkish-Armenian border, the kind of public and embarrassing mess no intelligence agency wanted on their scorecard. "No name, no body," Kara had said. She had lifted her beer, tipped it in a mock salute. "Ten bucks says she surfaces in six months with a dirty bomb and a manifesto." John hadn't let himself react, hadn't taken the bet, but Kara had seen something in his expression and laughed, too sharp and too loud. "I know that look, John. Don't get your hopes up for a happier ending."

John isn't sure, now, whether he's caught a glimpse of a happier ending or not. As hard as it is to imagine Nikita leaving Division and getting away with it, it's even harder to imagine her finding work with a higher bidder--or, worse, going back. 

But then he thinks of Mark Snow, running for an elevator, running for a safe house, and never making it, and maybe it's not so hard to imagine after all. 

"Well, she wasn't working alone," Finch says. He gives John a quick look that's easy to interpret; it's the look he has when he's pretending he doesn't already know everything there is to know about John's previous career, and he's hoping John will play along. It should rankle, the questions and the game, but somehow it's different when it isn't John's life spilling across Finch's computers in files and photos. "She was talking to somebody, but it was well-encrypted. They have better than average security on their communications."

"Couldn't crack it?"

"You only spoke to her for two minutes, Mr. Reese," Finch says, with the faintest edge of wounded pride. "If you meet her again, try to reminisce for at least three. I'm sure you have plenty of catching up to do."

"I'll try. Because you ask so nicely." 

John watches Finch work for a few minutes, and he thinks about what he would like to ask, should he meet Nikita again, and how unlikely it is he'll get the chance, and he thinks about all the times he got as far as thinking, _I can't do this--_ , but never any farther. It had been easier, in the end, not to let his mind travel even that far down that impossible path. He could do it, so he did. There was always another hooded figure in another dark room, another script to follow, another set of orders. 

It hadn't been a surprise, in the end, when the CIA had made the decision for him. That's the way they preferred it.

Finch has stopped typing again, and there's a slight frown on his lips.

"Problem?" John says.

"No," Finch says, but slowly, his mind elsewhere engaged. "I'm considering the best way to locate an organization that is defined primarily by its operational non-existence."

"A lot of people believed Division was self-funded," John says. "Not a black budget, but a whole black economy." 

Finch looks at him. "Another rumor?"

"Spies gossip," John says. "All the time." He's rewarded with a quick smile.

"I don't like to imagine what sort of enterprises a covert intelligence organization might use to fund its operations," Finch says. "I take it we're talking about activities more widespread than the CIA's clumsy participation in the drug trade?"

"Drugs. Weapons. Assassinations." 

"All very lucrative, I'm sure, but is it enough?"

And it was Kara who had put those dots together too, one hot, miserable afternoon in Muscat. They had just spent eight days following an English businessman with ties to the Taliban's opium road out of Afghanistan, but they had arrived too late. The man was gone. Not off the radar, not gone to ground, not out of town, but _gone_ , vanished in a way that left greasy smudges in the bathtub and a bitter scent in the air. When they found the empty hotel room, Kara had laughed and said, "Fucking Division," as though they had stolen a carnival prize from her by getting there first. She had slammed a drawer shut and swiped sweat-damp hair back from her face. "I bet his little black book is worth a fortune in business opportunities."

He can hear her voice as though she's standing in this room, speaking in his ear, but for the first time in weeks he doesn't feel the wash of dismay, the constriction of a vest strapped tight across his chest. He can hear her voice, but she isn't here, and it's getting easier to let it fade away, to listen instead to the gentle, sleepy noises Bear makes at his feet, the clatter of quick fingers on keys and the distant generator rumble, to the creak of Finch's chair as he shifts position—he's aching and stiff, but he won't admit it—and the thoughtful hum that catches in the back of his throat. 

John says, "Not everybody has your resources, Harold."

"There are days I wonder if I'm going to have my resources by the time you're finished with them," Finch says, but his tone is playful and almost—John doesn't think he's imagining it—almost fond. 

"You'll figure it out," John says. "But you should eat your dinner first. It's going to get cold."

**Author's Note:**

> I do intend to continue this, but I make no promises about how much or how often or how quickly. I certainly have no greater plot or plan in mind than, "But of course all angsty guilt-ridden former assassins trying to do good in the world should meet up and hang out from time to time. _Of course._ "


End file.
